Republican, Fiscal Cliff | featured news

The budget battles rocking the capital have exposed a deepening fault line within an already fractured Republican Party: the divide between the GOP's solid Southern base and the rest of the country.

The November election significantly weakened the once-surging movement, and its activists have not been front and center in the fiscal debate consuming Washington.

While Republican leaders in the House of Representatives insist that raising tax rates on the rich is an impossibility, some Republican lawmakers now see it as inevitable to avoiding the "fiscal cliff" of severe tax hikes and spending cuts set to start January 1.

Republicans in the Congress attacked each other on Tuesday over their leadership's "fiscal cliff" offer to Democratic President Barack Obama as a group of governors visited the White House to voice concern about the impact on the states of the year-end tax-and-spending deadline.

Fifty-three percent of Americans said Republicans in Congress would be more to blame if the government could not reach an agreement to avoid the combination of spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the beginning of the year.